It looks like autumn has finally arrived after the long, hot summer. Leaves start to turn yellow, and the blankets are already on our beds. Spookiness and coziness blend in the ConesaLab, but its members are as active as ever!
The month began with an impressive course guided by Tian, our AI expert. He walked us and many others from the I2SysBio through the mysterious world of AI agents. We learned how to use mainly Gemini to ease our lives, by either creating a quite decent presentation or updating our CVs (finally). Who knows… perhaps in a couple of months Mr. Robot will be writing these posts instead of me!
This course gave all of us a confidence boost, and Ana was in love with the new horizons opening in front of her eyes. So excited that she had to take a small holiday, and no better place for that than Uruguay. The perks of science, some might say. In mid-October, she was invited to teach in the Hands-on Bioinformatics for Genomic Analysis in Montevideo, and why not get there a week earlier? But not to do extra studying or anything, just to have a well-deserved break and enjoy the beauty of nature on the other side of the Atlantic puddle 😉
In the meantime, she left the rest of us in the lab, working on our posters and presentations for the JBI2025 in Madrid. Surely fun work! Nevertheless, we managed to have some fun during the first edition of Paellas in the I2SysBio 🥘 The proud Valencians of the group were happy to enjoy such a great thing as paella with all the collegues. Definetly and event that we are looking forward next year!
Tavelled for science in October
Asked to be funded
October was not only fun. In order to have fun, you need money, and to need money, you have to ask for it (like you used to do with your parents). Thus, October has been a proposal submission month. Through an almost sleepless night, Ana finished the submission a COST Actions proposal on the verge of the JBI. As well, Clara and Pablo decided to take the next step and submitted their first proposal the day after Ana. This was a MSCA Citizens project to do outreach with people with disabilities and at risk of social exclusion. We really, really hope that all these projects come to life! That way, the stressful days and sleepless nights will have their reward.
With everything submitted, most of the lab went to the JBI in Madrid. Virtu, Alejandro, and the students were left to guard the castle and take care of the growing cells (yes! We finally have a wet lab 💧). On the first JBI day, during the student symposium, both Quique and VÃctor gave short talks presenting their respective posters. After that, they spent the whole conference chasing other posters about spatial transcriptomics… so involved that Quique even forgot to have his beloved afternoon coffee.
As a fun story, Pablo was so invested in finishing the Marie Curie proposal that he forgot his poster at home… Thankfully, Carlos was there to save the day, and they swapped poster sessions!
The conference went smoothly: meeting old peers, creating new connections, and updating ourselves on the Iberian bioinformatics landscape, which is truly incredible. Carol, our presentation superstar, had not one, not two, not three, but two presentations during the conference. She presented to the audience her two latest tools, MoSim and SQANTI-reads! Everybody was flabbergasted by them and by the utilities they offer to the community. Imagine how great they are: she won the prize for the Best Highlight Presentation with SQANTI-reads… What a blast for the ConesaLab! Ana was proud of all of us.
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To finish off the month, Ana and Pablo went to Cambridge to visit the Sanger Institute and attend the Understanding Life conference, organized by the Wellcome Genome Campus. Those three days were packed with genomics, biodiversity, and evolution, with a special focus on the biology of it. Pablo could promote the soon-to-be-released SQANTI-evidence, and Ana didn’t lose a second to move her connections and establish future collaborations. That’s how science works, folks.
With that, we closed spoOktober. At the moment, Ana, Julen, and Fabian are in Berlin, participating in a biohackathon, but that’s a story for another month 😉